Impress

The IMPRESS project is an EU-funded project to improve the engagement of software engineering students through gamication. The client tasked the team to create a fun game which helps students practice formal specications. Important here is that fun should be a priority, and teaching students should be less of a priority. The game should be in a complete website interface, and teachers should be able to submit exercises to be worked into a level of the game. This level can be assigned to students as a homework assignment, and thus teachers should have a way to check if students have completed the issued assignment. The game was designed to be a tower defence game. Students write formal specications using a block building system, and this in sequences the tower defence: enemies come in good and bad variants which can or cannot be shot depending on the correctness of the formal specications. This all is themed around hardware components of a computer, which matches the use of formal specifications closely. Teachers can submit a problem around which a level is created. The game includes an adaptive difficulty progression system so that students are prepared for the teacher problem when they reach it. Students must be invited by a teacher to join a virtual classroom, and the created account is restricted to this classroom only. This way, no unwanted guests play the level, and valid statistics can be generated around a level.